Here I finally conclude my prolonged look at short science fiction from the year 1997 as it appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection. The final story is a novella, and one written in the good old tradition of "hard" science fiction, celebrating extraterrestrial exploration in our near future...
A COLD, DRY CRADLE by Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre
A privately funded team of four has gone to Mars to claim a prize for being "the first" there...and to bring back to Earth their discoveries. This story predicts the privatization of space travel as the first President Bush's 1989 goal of going to Mars in thirty years hits a major snag when the "astronomical" price of the venture is revealed. Instead, a much smaller prize is offered in a competition to see who can get there (and back) before others. The protagonist is Ann, a biologist married to Piotr, the mission's captain. Her discoveries underneath the Martian surface, as well as the technical aspects of running and repairing the damaged ship along with various facts thrown in about astrophysics, makes this an interesting fictional lesson in science...especially with regard to biology on a number of levels. Also, the authors gave no doubt about how they felt about how the sensationalist news media has fed into the public's perception of space travel. I felt that this tale was more in line with what I would deem to be "classical" science fiction, along the lines of how Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein treated the genre...
The next time around in my short story reviews I plan to look at the year 1998 in science fiction...
No comments:
Post a Comment